” The photos are JUST LIME words that consist a LANGUAGE. Photography is nothing but just ANOTHER language . Guitar is the same .. 99% of ALL OF US out there struggling to be VIRTUOSOS .. ( think guitar player Steve Vai ) , he IS THE VIRTUOSO.. But but but UNLIKE bob Dylan or Neil young ( for example ) , Steve have no story to tell…
Thus said , I DO believe your skills/ techniques are fine.. You can always and you SHOULD ALWAYS develop them and never relax.. When u master a medium ( let’s say DSLR) move to another ( for example iPhone etc).. Never ever stop fucking around with all mediums.. DSLR , medium format, phone, guitar , cello, drums etc..
NOW now now WAIT…
Mastering mediums is a non end process .. It’s fun but also frustrating .. But still.. It’s like a WARRIOR / ninja learning how to use different weapons ..
But u know very well why soldiers / ninjas practice on weapons, right?
For the NEXT WAR/ assignment / project etc.. Warriors WANT TO MAKE A STATEMENT ..
Back to your photos now.. Your photos are beautiful little weapons and me ( THE AUDIENCE ) .. I’m all ears and I’m all EYES..
Now MAKE SURE TO USE those photos weapons for a WAR.. A reason, a story.. STORY TELLING should be our ONLY FRUSTRATION..
Individual prints/ singles MEAN NOTHING.. Your story ANY STORY THAT U BELIEVE in , is everything ..
I enjoyed the photos but I’m STILL WAITING ANXIOUSLY for your story: YOUR POINT OF YOU: THE STORY.. And I’ll keep on waiting until you find out and DECIDE what you want to say.. And I wi
Always be waiting , till u deliver ..
Till then , ALL YOU GIVING us , is a glimpse of your weaponry. And I love your weapons, BUT THE WAR ALREADY STARTED.. And you’re NOT there .. Not yet ..
But I know u can deliver and I know u can fight well.. Ok ? I’m waiting, we are all waiting, but plz do NOT let us wait for ever…

I think you’re being a little harsh with Steve Vai. Yes he’s fast and technically amazing but I do believe he’s got loads of pa couple of songs which are honest and tell a story.
BTW congratulations with your BurnDiary, authentic confession…

““Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”–Rilke

How does one begin to sing the lyric of loss?

Maybe it begins not through confrontation but through acceptance, without judgment or ennui or moralizing or faithlessness or detours but through the opening: to allow all that shadow and all that triggered light to come ringing in and fill us, terrified and alive and broken and mending beneath that shadow’d warmth and light. We begin to begin the moment we unstitch ourselves and take all of it, loss and leverage, gain and submission, love and languish, the gray with the greens, in.

We become the moment we toss aside all our efforts to become and allow that widening drift to spin and shuffle and settle all of our fractured and rambled selves point-to-point against the part from which we broke apart and came together again.

I havent written on BURN in a long time and just havent had the energy or desire to write here (not because the pictures and stories aren’t compelling but because my own thoughts and words and focused more on digging up and out my own caverns and canals), but I cannot let this series go by without a few words.

Without a doubt, Panos’ recent series has been my favorite of all the BURN diary projects.

It frightened me.
It worried me.
It inspired me.
It ingnited me.
It bathed me.
It bloodied me.
It broke and blocked and vanquished me.
It pulled me up as well.

I have always and only truly been interested in stories (written or painted or sung or played or photographed or shared) that spoke to me of life and of death, stories that refused both to apologize for what they described and did so without sermonizing or patronizing or obfuscating or pandering to an audience for affection or award. This is a story of loss, make no bones about that. This is also a story of honesty. This series attempts to share and document and sing out both brutal pain and self-loathing and madness and the ecstatic: call it the anima and animus of life, a delving into unapolgetic life and loss and possibly something thinning out through that square of light in the distance.

Shakespeare reminds to ‘hark the man who hath not music in his soul’ and that music may be celebratory or funereal but the song is what reminds us of what is best about us, even when we are at our worst.

We were meant to live and lose this life and the burnishing of all that is what matters for there for each of us go we, shaping and shopping out the light and shadow in pain and comfort, in medication and oblivion, in the swath of our lives, tearing and torn.

And yet, even the most torn cloth becomes a swatch to band-aid something, no matter how thin.

I call that swatch of torn cloth the heart of our slippery and broken self. And that is what clocks the days and ways of each of our lives.

I count on that and it fills me with hope.

Congratulations on a brutal but ultimately profoundly loving essay.

Love yourself more Panos, for it is in your essence and in the essence of the fact that life takes much away, everything from it, but it does so because it knows no better.

And that must be our reconciliation. For it is from that that we learn and grow and learn to live.